“Pixelmator makes it incredibly easy and fun for anyone to enjoy the best of image editing,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “Now, with Pixelmator 1.6?s Nucleus foundation, which takes advantage of the latest Mac OS X technologies, Pixelmator delivers the greatest-possible image editing performance ever.”

In addition to 64-bit support, which makes use of large amounts of RAM and increases performance, Pixelmator team engineers have polished almost every part of the Pixelmator foundation in order to allow users to take full advantage of the incredible power of graphics processing that is available in the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Thanks to these improvements, the overall performance of Pixelmator increased up to 40%; the launch time is now twice as fast and the ability to paint with Pixelmator is four times faster than it was in the previous version. Users will notice the overall performance improvements in nearly every function of the application.

The new Layer Groups feature allows users to easily organize and manage layers in a Pixelmator composition. They can use groups to arrange their layers in a logical order and to reduce clutter in the Layers palette. Users can also use Layer Groups to apply blending modes, opacity, masks, or even transformations to multiple layers simultaneously.

The new additions to Pixelmator’s Send To feature makes it easy to quickly publish images to online photo sharing sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa right from the application.

The new Import feature allows quick and easy importing of images directly to Pixelmator from cameras, scanners, and multifunction devices such as camera/phones, printer/ scanners, and such as iPhones and iPads.

Other new features in Pixelmator 1.6 Nucleus include redesigned transforming tools which are more precise and easier-to-use, Automator Actions for trimming and watermarking images, improved printing, minor user interface changes, compatibility improvements, and several bug fixes.

How would you go about making a selection of a certain amount of exact pixels? For instance, let’s say I want a selection box of 16px x 92px. Where do I just type in the numbers and get me a 16px x 92px selection box? Or even better, combining percent with pixels. w: 100% h: 4px.

This is really the main reason why I do not buy pixelmator, it lacks this basic feature on it’s selection tool which makes it more or less worthless for working with web design and such.

What do we need CMYK for in 2010? Color management is the way to go. Or do you want to store multiple versions for different printing methods and materials and do you always know what profile to choose to convert your RGB to CMYK?

When I heard about the pending update, I bought my license to Pixelmator. Now that it’s here, I know I did the right thing. This thing flies! No more noticeable lag on the Wacom tablet. It’s everything I wanted, so thanks very much.

Quick Drop Shadow – Select the layer you want to drop shadow, press Command j, this duplicates the layer. Press Command u and turn the Lightness slider all the way down. Nudge the image over and down to create the drop shadow effect. Use blur filter to feather the shadow.

Still my favourite desktop art app (and when you get to the mobile devices I’m hopeful you’ll make me happy there too 🙂 )

One small-ish bleat though: when did kaleidoscope stop drawing the image off screen? I used to enjoy noodling around with it, moving the centre spot around and then centering the result? Can this be brought back? To have it cut off the image means you then lose a lot of detail.

Apart from that – lovely, speedy, snappy and excellent as ever. Nice one Team Pixel 🙂

Like many before me have said and I will say it again beautiful product ! great release !

=)

However…

Im really hoping you guys developing Pixelmator could be more forthcoming about when or IF ? you will add LAYER STYLES to the mix.

You could pretty much kill half of Adobe Photoshops market share overnight on MAC platform if you added LAYER STYLE support to your software, trust me there is a lot of anger about photoshop and how slow and bloated it has become, its a win win for you guys.

So please do tell us will this feature come to us soon via your software ?

Had to switch back to v.1.5. I use an older photo printer which works fine with Spider, but all my custom color adjustments are lost with v.1.6. As a result, I can’t use all my fine art printing papers. Not acceptable! I’d love to work with some of the new features, but they’re of no use if I can’t print.

I just learned about Pixelmater two years ago and fell inlove with its kaleidoscope feature – even mounted a one woman show based on its capabilities. So I am upset that the kaleidoscope feature in the most recent launch is no longer what it used to be. I can’t even find it!!!, It was your best tool in my view. Anyone out there who knows a first rate kaleidescope effect? I have only found limp versions compared to what Pixelmator once offered.